Linked Early Modern Drama Online (LEMDO) is an infrastructural project designed to host the New Internet Shakespeare Editions (NISE) and other anthologies of early modern plays. This chapter – the first scholarly piece about LEMDO as a project – begins with a brief overview of the origins of LEMDO and its three principal objectives: to preserve the work of the old ISE and its sibling projects; to build a platform that sets new standards for preparing and preserving digital editions; and to create a networked hub for the study of early modern drama. LEMDO provides tools to view Shakespeare ‘in combination’, serves multiple user groups and supports asynchronous collaboration. Although LEMDO disseminates both digital and print outputs through its partnership with UVic ePublishing, editors agree to leave their editions ‘open’ for future pedagogical annotations so that the edition can capture the performances and criticism that the edition inspires. Students are stakeholders in and co-creators of LEMDO as part of their education, not merely consumers of its outputs. The involvement of students makes long-term preservation an ethical matter.

Edward’s Boys’ productions of early modern drama provide valuable insights into a repertoire that was written mostly with children performers in mind, attracting a great deal of professional interest from academics and theatre practitioners. This chapter focuses on a collaboration between Edward’s Boys and the Montpellier Institute for research in the Renaissance, the neo-Classical era and the Enlightenment (IRCL). In 2016, 2018 and 2022, Edward’s Boys were invited to perform before audiences of Francophone teenagers in the context of an action research programme led by the IRCL with six high schools that explores ways of fostering civic values and linguistic skills through acting and spectating experiences (Florence March discusses this programme in Chapter 2 of this volume). For Edward’s Boys, performing in France represents a break with their usual performance and audience culture and offers a novel adaptive and educational experience. This chapter traces how this collaborative project was imagined, designed, implemented and experienced, and how adjustments were introduced between the 2016 and 2018 visits. It considers the underlying ethos of the project’s work with young performers and audiences, and reflects on the benefits and challenges such opportunities offer for creative, peer-to-peer interaction within a research context.

Shakespeare education is being reimagined around the world. This book delves into the important role of collaborative projects in this extraordinary transformation. Over twenty innovative Shakespeare partnerships from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Europe and South America are critically explored by their leaders and participants. Structured into thematic sections covering engagement with schools, universities, the public, the digital and performance, this book offers vivid insights into what it means to teach, learn and experience Shakespeare in collaboration with others. Diversity, equality, identity, incarceration, disability, community and culture are key factors in these initiatives, which together reveal how complex and humane Shakespeare education can be. Whether you are interested in practice or theory, this collection showcases an abundance of rich, inspiring and informative perspectives on Shakespeare education in our contemporary world.

A director who has facilitated Shakespeare programmes in prisons for fifteen years in conversation with a former prisoner who served eighteen years and who participated in four of those programmes. The authors explore the ways in which performative Shakespeare programmes fill a niche otherwise unoccupied in the prison system – a recreational programme that offers opportunities for collaboration, growth and the development of empathic and communication skills that are not constrained by a deficit-based and outcome-oriented pedagogy. The programme offers models of camaraderie and support that are not ‘in opposition to’ other groups, and promotes collaborative over individual achievement. The development of intrinsic motivation is a key component in functioning as a free citizen, but is actively discouraged by the correctional system. Prison Shakespeare programmes develop these skills in addition to offering a practical critique to the model of ‘toughness’ promoted by the prisoners’ own cultural milieu. The chapter speaks to the value of recreation for its own sake, and how it can be a vital component in both education and rehabilitation precisely because it does not set out to do either.

Working in different countries provides huge learning opportunities for theatre practitioners in understanding the capacity of drama pedagogies to uncover deep human connections beneath more superficial cultural differences, and to learn ways of negotiating the obstacles those cultural differences create. As recent years have brought more focus on both the social justice imperatives and the overall value of diversity and inclusion across schools and societies, the need to connect across cultures becomes ever more important. In this chapter we describe the journeys of our work exploring Shakespeare through intercultural dialogue with Omani colleagues. We describe the content and timeline of two interlinked multiphase education projects on Shakespeare with Omani teachers and students: the first with the Royal Shakespeare Company, which began as part of an education enquiry for the World Shakespeare Festival in 2012, and the second with Butterfly Theatre Collective, a small Meisner rooted company who specialise in exploring the uniqueness of every performance and performer. We offer a comparison of the practicalities in carrying out similar projects with two very different arts companies, and share the conceptual and emotional learning we found through our associations with Omani teachers, directors, actors and young people.

The World Shakespeare Project (WSP), directed by Sheila T. Cavanagh at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Shakespeare Central (SC), created and led by Steve Rowland in Seattle, Washington, collaborate together regularly. The WSP uses site visits and videoconferencing to link diverse students, teachers and arts practitioners in Shakespearean-based conversations and performance exercises across many geographic, socio-economic and other divides. SC seeks to facilitate Shakespearean pedagogy in order to further its tenets that ‘Shakespeare is for Everyone’ and that ‘Shakespeare Changes Lives.’ The WSP/SC partnership takes many forms, but this Shakespeare in Prison project continues to teach us about ways to integrate personal experiences with academic undertakings. Shared explorations of Shakespeare appear to increase learning for everyone involved.

Cooperative learning as a pedagogical method effectively reflects the communal character of the performing arts. By creating knowledge about Shakespearean performance collaboratively, students and educators lay claim to the ethics and ownership of that knowledge, an act that is particularly urgent and meaningful in the age of COVID-19 when we need to rebuild sociality.

This chapter demonstrates how communal writing assignments and digital, video-based pedagogy turn textual and performative variants in Shakespeare’s plays into a cluster of inclusive narratives for critical analysis. Shakespeare is no longer a white canon with culturally predetermined meanings.

One effective tool for communal writing assignments is Perusall.com, an open-access platform that incentivize and support collaborative annotation of texts, images and videos. Grounded in the notion of textual variants, the pedagogy encourages students to claim Shakespeare’s language rather than aiming for interpretations that are gratuitous or merely politically correct.

Working in tandem with collaborative textual analysis is video-centric collaboration. By turning a large number of performance versions into common objects of study, my digital video project makes links between adaptations that were previously regarded as distinct. In pedagogical contexts, the malleability of digital video puts play texts and performances to work in an interactive environment. Online performance video archives can encourage user curation and interaction with other forms of cultural records. In practice, this redistributes the power of collecting, re-arranging and archiving cultural records away from a centralised authority to the hands of student users.

Borrowing a term from Larry Friedlander’s 1991 essay on the future of Shakespeare study in the digital age, “Shakespeare, Linking Archives, and the ‘Living Variorum’” argues that while extensive online Shakespeare archives and collections now exist, the future of online Shakespeare education might be well served by recalling the ambition of the pioneering pre-Web cross-media projects, and by: (1) expanding and linking existing archives in such a way that a student, researcher or anyone else interested in Shakespeare can access materials relevant to a line of text across all available media classes — text, commentaries, digital facsimiles of early editions, works of art and videos of performances and films; and (2) focus educational initiatives on the expanded possibilities, including support for student creation of multimedia essays, discussions and pathways that reading and writing across media in such a linked archives can provide. The chapter provides examples of such cross-media reading by drawing on existing projects including the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive and Shakespeare Electronic Archive as well as HamletWorks, and Understanding Shakespeare to create sample pathways a student or researcher might take through key moments in Hamlet variant texts, illustrations, commentaries, and videos drawn from productions and films from the United Kingdom, Brazil, Japan and Russia.

This chapter investigates questions of language, context, cross-cultural communication and collective learning through three examples from Fórum Shakespeare. For the past twenty years, the (almost) bi-annual project Fórum Shakespeare has brought young actors from Brazilian peripheries together with theatre makers and audiences to ask questions about multicultural, multilingual and potentially mutually beneficial ways of engaging with Shakespeare. The three case studies discussed in this chapter include: Paul Heritage’s work on Romeo and Juliet with a group of juvenile prisoners in Rio de Janeiro in 1999; Bridget Escolme’s workshops for young people in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador and Brasília in 2011, 2013 and 2014; and Catherine Silverstone’s lecture and workshop for general audiences in São Paulo in 2016. The Fórum – and each case study – insists on the plurality of Shakespeare. The chapter explores how professional and non-professional participants have disturbed the harmful assumptions and challenged the negative expectations that limit young people, while teaching pleasure, resilience and compassion through performance. In Fórum Shakespeare meaning has consistently been constructed through exchange, with participants’ embodied acts of translation introducing new understandings of how working inter-culturally with Shakespeare’s texts can allow different stories to be told.

Shakespeare education is being reimagined around the world. This book delves into the important role of collaborative projects in this extraordinary transformation. Over twenty innovative Shakespeare partnerships from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Europe and South America are critically explored by their leaders and participants. Structured into thematic sections covering engagement with schools, universities, the public, the digital and performance, this book offers vivid insights into what it means to teach, learn and experience Shakespeare in collaboration with others. Diversity, equality, identity, incarceration, disability, community and culture are key factors in these initiatives, which together reveal how complex and humane Shakespeare education can be. Whether you are interested in practice or theory, this collection showcases an abundance of rich, inspiring and informative perspectives on Shakespeare education in our contemporary world.

In 2013 Bell Shakespeare, Australia’s national theatre company specialising in Shakespeare in performance, education and community settings, formalised their primary Shakespeare programme. The programme includes in-school performances of Shakespeare’s plays specially scripted for young audiences, immersive workshops and teacher professional learning opportunities.

The authors share their own early experiences with Shakespeare before discussing why adults and secondary students sometimes develop negative perceptions of Shakespeare’s works. The potential of introducing Shakespeare in primary contexts is then explored. The findings from initial exploratory research with participant teachers and students in three diverse schools together with the perspectives and experiences of the Company suggest primary children readily engage with Shakespeare’s stories, characters and language. Many of the themes resonate with young learners’ lives and imaginations. Finally, Bell Shakespeare’s arts-rich pedagogy and principles for optimising the introduction of Shakespeare’s work to primary students are detailed.

Shakespeare education is being reimagined around the world. This book delves into the important role of collaborative projects in this extraordinary transformation. Over twenty innovative Shakespeare partnerships from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Europe and South America are critically explored by their leaders and participants. Structured into thematic sections covering engagement with schools, universities, the public, the digital and performance, this book offers vivid insights into what it means to teach, learn and experience Shakespeare in collaboration with others. Diversity, equality, identity, incarceration, disability, community and culture are key factors in these initiatives, which together reveal how complex and humane Shakespeare education can be. Whether you are interested in practice or theory, this collection showcases an abundance of rich, inspiring and informative perspectives on Shakespeare education in our contemporary world.

Shakespeare education is being reimagined around the world. This book delves into the important role of collaborative projects in this extraordinary transformation. Over twenty innovative Shakespeare partnerships from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East, Europe and South America are critically explored by their leaders and participants. Structured into thematic sections covering engagement with schools, universities, the public, the digital and performance, this book offers vivid insights into what it means to teach, learn and experience Shakespeare in collaboration with others. Diversity, equality, identity, incarceration, disability, community and culture are key factors in these initiatives, which together reveal how complex and humane Shakespeare education can be. Whether you are interested in practice or theory, this collection showcases an abundance of rich, inspiring and informative perspectives on Shakespeare education in our contemporary world.